The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu

The Cruelest Journey

600 Miles to Timbuktu

Kira Salak

Restless Books | Brooklyn, NY

For my mother and her own journey, with love

Copyright © 2005 Kira Salak

Digital edition published by Restless Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2015.

Originally published by the National Geographic Society, 2005.

ISBN 978-1-63206-067-9

Cover design by Joshua Ellison

All rights reserved.

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The Author’s West Africa Expedition

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.… Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, What is the use? For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a great deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.

—Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The Worst Journey in the World

The winds roared, and the rains fell.

The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree.

He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn.

Let us pity the white man; no mother has he.

—Native ballad written about Mungo Park,

Ségou Korro, 1796

Prologue

Wide Afric, doth thy sun Lighten, thy hills unfold a city as fair

As those which starred the night o’ the elder world?

Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo

A dream as frail as those of ancient time?

—Tennyson

I can’t imagine Timbuktu here. I stay in another of the world’s cheap hotel rooms, this time in Mali, West Africa, in the capital city of Bamako. Cockroaches crouch behind the cracked porcelain toilet bowl; beetles climb the walls; mosquitoes hover over me, half-dazed. Unsavory couples check in to rooms next door, checking out a couple of hours later. But I’m fortunate because my room includes a shower, however basic, with a weary trickle of water. The electricity goes out at 9 a.m. sharp, turning off a rickety overhead fan, allowing the heat to filter through a pitted screen over the window and settle on my skin like a balm. I lie on a thin green cotton bedspread, wondering when it was last washed, trying to guess the source of the various stains on it. The frenetic sound of Bamako traffic invades through the wooden shutters that I always keep closed over the window. I hear a crashing sound from cars on the street—the usual, familiar crashing sound that I only seem to hear from such rooms—followed by yells in incensed Bambarra. Then, once again, the growls of passing motorbikes and the return of the dull, featureless mulling of crowds.

I roll onto my side, listening, studying, trying to memorize the poverty. The bloody smears of dead mosquitoes on the whitewashed wall before me. A floor that, if stepped on, leaves dust and strangers’ hairs and fallen stucco from the ceiling clinging to the soles of my feet. A TV roaring from the room of the guy down the hall, whose job it is to clean these rooms, though of course he only makes the beds. The toilet smelling strongly of piss. The bed reeking of mildew and pungent sweat. The sink drip-dripping water with the certainty of a second hand.

Very little changes about these rooms except the languages I hear through the window, or the color of the bedspreads, or the wattage of the single overhead lightbulb. These are rooms that wake me in the middle of the night. Rooms that hold their darkness in gravid pause. Rooms that require sleeping pills because I so badly want the day back. They tell me when it’s time to leave. They start all my journeys.

Chapter One

In the beginning, my journeys feel at best ludicrous, at worst insane. This one is no exception. The idea is to paddle nearly 600 miles on the Niger River in a kayak, alone, from the Malian town of Old Ségou to Timbuktu. And now, at the very hour when I have decided to leave, a thunderstorm bursts open the skies, sending down apocalyptic rain, washing away the very ground beneath my feet. It is the rainy season in Mali, for which there can be no comparison in the world. Lightning pierces trees, slices across houses. Thunder racks the skies and pounds the earth like mortar fire, and every living thing huddles in tenuous shelter, expecting the world to end. Which it doesn’t. At least not this time. So that we all give a collective sigh to the salvation of the passing storm as it rumbles its way east, and I survey the river I’m to leave on this morning. Rain or no rain, today is the day for the journey to begin. And no one, not even the oldest in the village, can say for certain whether I’ll get to the end.

Let’s do it, I say, leaving the shelter of an adobe hut. My guide from town, Modibo, points to the north, to further storms. He says he will pray for me. It’s the best he can do. To his knowledge, no man has ever completed such a trip, though a few have tried. And certainly no woman has done such a thing. This morning he took me aside and told me he thinks I’m crazy, which I understood as concern and thanked him. He told me that the people of Old Ségou think I’m crazy too, and that only uncanny good luck will keep me safe.

Still, when a person tells me I can’t do something, I’ll want to do it all the more. It may be a failing of mine. I carry my inflatable kayak through the narrow passageways of Old Ségou, past the small adobe huts melting in the rains, past the huddling goats and smoke of cooking fires, people peering out at me from the dark entranceways. It is a labyrinth of ancient homes, built and rebuilt after each storm, plastered with the very earth people walk upon. Old Ségou must look much the same as it did in Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s time when, exactly 206 years ago to the day, he left on the first of his two river journeys down the Niger to Timbuktu, the first such attempt by a Westerner. It is no coincidence that I’ve planned to leave on the same day and from the same spot. Park is my benefactor of sorts, my guarantee. If he could travel down the Niger, then so can I. And it is all the guarantee I have for this trip—that an obsessed 19th-century adventurer did what I would like to do. Of course Park also died on this river, but I’ve so far managed to overlook that.

I gaze at the Niger through the adobe passageways, staring at waters that began in the mountainous rain forests of Guinea and traveled all this way to central Mali—waters that will journey northeast with me to Timbuktu before cutting a great circular swath through the Sahara and retreating south, through Niger, on to Nigeria, passing circuitously through mangrove swamps and jungle, resting at last in the Atlantic in the Bight of Benin. But the Niger is more than a river; it is a kind of faith. Bent and plied by Saharan sands, it perseveres more than 2,600 miles from beginning to end through one of the hottest, most desolate regions of the world. And when the rains come each year, it finds new strength of purpose, surging through the sunbaked lands, giving people the boons of crops and livestock and fish, taking nothing, asking nothing. It humbles all who see it.

If I were to try to explain why I’m here, why I chose Mali and the Niger for this journey—now that is a different matter. I can already feel the resistance in my gut, the familiar clutch of fear. I used to avoid stripping myself down in search of motivation, scared of what I might uncover, scared of anything that might suggest a taint of the pathological. And would it be enough to say that I admire Park’s own trip on the river and want to try a similar challenge? That answer carries a whiff of the disingenuous; it sounds too easy to me. Human motivation, itself, is a complicated thing. If only it was simple enough to say, Here is the Niger, and I want to paddle it. But I’m not that kind of traveler, and this isn’t that kind of trip. If a journey doesn’t have something to teach you about yourself, then what kind of journey is it? There is one thing I’m already certain of: Though we may think we choose our journeys, they choose us.

Hobbled donkeys cower under a new onslaught of rain, ears back, necks craned. Little naked children dare each other to touch me, and I make it easy for them, stopping and holding out my arm. They stroke my white skin as if it were velvet, using only the pads of their fingers, then stare at their hands to check for wet paint.

Thunder again. More rain falls. I stop on the shore, near a centuries-old kapok tree under which I imagine Park once took shade. I open my bag, spread out my little red kayak, and start to pump it up. I’m doing this trip under the sponsorship of National Geographic Adventure, which hopes to run a magazine story about it. This means that they need photos, lots of photos, and so a French photographer named Rémi Bénali feverishly snaps pictures of me. I don’t know what I hate more—river storms or photo shoots. I value the privacy and integrity of my trips, and I don’t want my journey turning into a circus. The magazine presented the best compromise it could: Rémi, renting a motor-driven pirogue, was given instructions to find me on the river every few days to do his thing.

My kayak is nearly inflated. A couple of women nearby, with colorful cloth wraps called pagnes tied tightly about their breasts, gaze at me cryptically, as if to ask: Who are you and what do you think you’re doing? The Niger churns and slaps the shore, in a surly mood. I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing. Just one thing at a time now, kayak inflated, kayak loaded with my gear. Paddles fitted together and ready. Modibo is standing on the shore, watching me.

I’ll pray for you, he reminds me.

I balance my gear, adjust the straps, get in. And, finally, irrevocably, I paddle away.

When Mungo Park left on his second trip, he never admitted that he was scared. It is what fascinates me about his writing—his insistence on maintaining an illusion that all was well, even as he began a journey that he knew from previous experience could only beget tragedy. Hostile peoples, unknown rapids, malarial fevers. Hippos and crocodiles. The giant Lake Debo to cross, like being set adrift on an inland sea, no sight of land, no way of knowing where the river starts again. Forty of his forty-four men dead from sickness, Park himself afflicted with dysentery when he left on this trip. And it can boggle the mind, what drives some people to risk their lives for the mute promises of success. It boggles my mind, at least, as I am caught up in the same affliction. Already, I fear the irrationality of my journey, the relentless stubbornness that drives me on.

The storm erupts into a new overture. Torrential rains. Waves higher than my kayak, trying to capsize me. But my boat is self-bailing and I stay afloat. The wind drives the current in reverse, tearing and ripping at the shores, sending spray into my face. I paddle madly, crashing and driving forward. I travel inch by inch, or so it seems, arm muscles smarting and rebelling against this journey. I crawl past New Ségou, fighting the Niger for more distance. Large river steamers rest in jumbled rows before cement docks, the town itself looking dark and deserted in the downpour. No one is out in their boats. The people know something I don’t: that the river dictates all travel.

A popping feeling now and a screech of pain. My right arm lurches from a ripped muscle. But this is no time and place for such an injury, and I won’t tolerate it, stuck as I am in a storm. I try to get used to the pulses of pain as I fight the river. There is only one direction to go: forward. Stopping has become anathema.

***

I wonder what we look for when we embark on these kinds of trips. There is the pat answer that you tell the people you don’t know: that you’re interested in seeing a place, learning about its people. But then the trip begins and the hardship comes, and hardship is more honest: it tells us that we don’t have enough patience yet, nor humility, nor gratitude. And we thought that we did. Hardship brings us closer to truth, and thus is more difficult to bear, but from it alone comes compassion. And so I’ve told the world that it can do what it wants with me during this trip if only, by the end, I have learned something more. A bargain, then. The journey, my teacher.

And where is the river of just this morning, with its whitecaps that would have liked to drown me, with its current flowing backward against the wind? Gone to this: a river of smoothest glass, a placidity unbroken by wave or eddy, with islands of lush greenery awaiting me like distant Xanadus. The Niger is like a mercurial god, meting out punishment and benediction on a whim. And perhaps the god of the river sleeps now, returning matters to the mortals who ply its waters? The Bozo and Somono fishermen in their pointy canoes. The long passenger pirogues, overloaded with people and merchandise, rumbling past, leaving diesel fumes in their wake. And now, inexplicably, the white woman in a little red boat, paddling through waters that flawlessly mirror the cumulus clouds above. We all belong here, in our way. It is as if I’ve entered a very lucid dream, continually surprised to find myself here on this river—I’ve become a hapless actor in a mysterious play, not yet knowing what my part is, left to gape at the wonder of what I have set in motion. Somehow: I’m in a kayak, on the Niger River, paddling very slowly but very surely to Timbuktu.

I pass tiny villages of adobe huts on the shores, some large and full of busy work: women washing clothes and dishes in the river, children chasing after goats, men repairing fishing nets. In other villages, some smaller and less permanent-looking with huts made from mud and thatch, men lounge beneath trees and swat flies and talk. The women pound millet with wooden pestles the size of a small child. I get used to the certainty of their up and down movements, the thump of the pestle in the stone mortar, again and again, like a drumbeat. It is the music of rural Mali, as are the fervent calls of the children when I pass, and the great bellowing of donkeys that could surely be heard on the other side of the world. Each village has its own mud mosque sending squat minarets to the heavens. There is nothing glamorous about the architecture—no sharp angles or filigree or carvings—but it is this very unprepossessing quality that makes the mosques special. Like mud castles of childhood fancy, they seem built from some latent creative energy, spiky sticks topping the minarets, ostrich eggs beacon-like on the highest points, with small portholes carved from the mud sides and staring out enigmatically at the traveler. The impulse is to stop and try to peek inside, to get a look at the dark interior, the primordial secrets within.

But I only pass by. The mosques in these parts probably wouldn’t be open to me. Before my trip began, I asked to see one in a riverside village, and the imam (head of the mosque) solemnly shook his head. A reason was translated to me: I’m an infidel, a sinner. I would not even be allowed to climb the outside stairs. He also called me a Christian, and though he was incorrect (I practice Buddhism), I felt a tweaking in my stomach that was part anger, part sorrow: I had been summed up and dismissed in a matter of seconds. But surely it’s human nature to overlook similarities for differences, people fortifying imaginary walls between themselves more insurmountable than any made from stone.

The late afternoon sun settles complacently over the hills to the west. Paddling becomes a sort of meditation now, a gentle trespassing over a river that slumbers. The Niger gives me its beauty almost in apology for the violence of the earlier storms, treating me to smooth silver waters that ripple in the sunlight. The current—if there is one—barely moves. Park described the same grandeur of the Niger during his second journey, in an uncharacteristically sentimental passage that provided a welcome respite from accounts of dying soldiers and baggage stolen by natives: We travelled very pleasantly all day; in fact nothing can be more beautiful than the views of this immense river; sometimes as smooth as a mirror, at other times ruffled with a gentle breeze, but at all times sweeping us along at the rate of six or seven miles per hour. I barely travel at one mile an hour, the river preferring—as I do—to loiter in the sun. I lean down in my seat and hang my feet over the sides of the kayak. I eat turkey jerky and wrap up my injured arm, part of which has swollen to the size of a grapefruit. I’m not worried about the injury anymore. I’m not worried about anything. I know this feeling won’t last, but for now I wrap myself in it, feeling the rare peace. To reach a place of not worrying is a greater freedom than anything I could hope to find on one of these trips. It is my true Undiscovered Country.

The Somono fishermen, casting out their nets, puzzle over me as I float by.

"Ça va, madame?" they yell.

Each fisherman carries a young son perched in the back of his pointed canoe to do the paddling. The boys stare at me, transfixed; they have never seen such a thing. A white woman. Alone. In a red, inflatable boat. Using a two-sided paddle.

I’m an even greater novelty because Malian women don’t paddle here, not ever. It is a man’s job. So there is no good explanation for me, and the people want to understand. They want to see if I’m strong enough for it, or if I even know how to use a paddle. They want to determine how sturdy my boat is. They gather on the shore in front of their villages to watch me pass, the kids screaming and jumping in excitement, the women with hands to foreheads to shield the sun as they stare, men yelling out questions in Bambarra which by now I know to mean: Where did you come from? Are you alone? Where’s your husband? And of course they will always ask: Where are you going? Timbuktu! I yell out to the last question. Which sounds preposterous to them, because everyone knows that Timbuktu is weeks away, and requires paddling across Lake Debo somehow, and through rapids and storms. And I am a woman, after all, which must make everything worse.

"Tombouctou!?!" they always repeat, just to be sure.

"Awo, I say in the Bambarra I’ve learned. Yes."

Head shakes. Shared grins. We wave goodbye, and the whole ritual begins at the next village. And at the next, and the next after that, kids running beside me along the shore, singing out their frantic choruses of "Ça va! Ça va!" I might be the pope, or someone close. But in between is the peace and silence of the wide river, the sun on me, a breeze licking my toes when I lie back to rest, the current as negligible as a faint breath.

I think often about Mungo Park’s journeys to this country, which were anything but easy for him. But he was a tough young Scot and had an impressive fortitude to endure with hardship. Park was only 23 years old when he left on his first journey to West Africa in search of the Niger River and Timbuktu. He was not without striking, fascinating contradictions in character. He was by any standards a devoutly spiritual man, convinced that the vagaries of life have their place in God’s scheme of things. He would write:

The melancholy, who complain of the shortness of human life, and the voluptuous, who think the present only their own, strive to fill up every moment with sensual enjoyment; but the man whose soul has been enlightened by his Creator, and enabled, though dimly, to discern the wonders of salvation, will look upon the joys and afflictions of this life as equally the tokens of Divine love. He will walk through the world as one travelling to a better country, looking forward with wonder to the author and finisher of his faith.

But he was also a pragmatist who could be lured by the trappings of future fame, confiding in his brother that he would acquire a name greater than any ever did. Was this merely explorer’s hubris? Or was it also the source